THE BIG BIRD CAGE (1972)

A film by Jack Hill.

Cast: Pam Grier, Anitra Ford, Candice Roman.

Terry, a social-climbing young woman accidentally gets caught up in the activities of two revolutionaries, Blossom and Django, and finds herself in a concentration camp for women. In the center of the camp is a towering wooden machine (“The Big Bird Cage”) in which the women risk their lives processing sugar as the evil warden looks on. The prisoners are subjected to sadistic cruelty from the guards and fellow prisoners, and all attempts at escape are dealt with…permanently. Terry’s only hope for escape lies in Blossom and her revolutionary allies. At the beginning of the film, when Terry (Anitra Ford) is taken to the prison by boat, the cove that she is dropped off at is the same one that was subsequently used for the location of the Kurtz compound in Apocalypse Now (both films were shot in the Philippines). Jack Hill decided to make this film a spoof in order to distinguish it from other entries in the women-in-prison genre. Several frames had to be removed from the sequence in which the female inmates rape Rocco the prison guard in order to avoid an X rating. Now those days it would been a R-Rating.